2D animation is not an artifact of the past, but it has been treated like one. It's an artform just like any other and its success depends on those involved with each project.

The Princess and the Frog was supposed to usher in a new demand for traditional animation. You can blame the marketing, the title or 2D animation, but the failure is one of story. It was poorly written! The animation was beautiful and the characters were interesting, but the movie was all over the place.

All 2D animation needs is a writer/director with something to say that speaks to moviegoers. Unfortunately we get rehashes of better films and self-indulgent movies that wouldn't pass a year-one film school critique.

I've never understood the failure of story because these films are made in slow motion. They take years! I was disappointed in FrankenWeenie, but I blame Tim Burton's lack of imagination and not stop-motion animation. The film would have been just as bad in CG.

I think traditional animation is fated for a comeback in popularity. It just needs quality writing and a good idea.

No they're not... they're just LAZY. They use CGI because it's easier, quicker, and cheaper to just do it all on computers, as opposed to sitting around, and drawing thousands and thousands of pictures to make a character mouth one syllable for one second's worth of time.

You know, reading carefully, this article is only referring to HAND DRAWN animation as opposed to 2D in general...and I think the problem here is that some of us *cough*me*cough* was using 2D to refer to hand drawn, which is causing confusion.

All I meant was that companies are too scared to use it these days. Everything is either cgi or flash...

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It makes sense from the perspective of the bean-counters. Everyone wondered what would fare better, FrankenWeenie or ParaNorman. Well both of them have been blown away by the CG Hotel Transylvania and that move is the worst of the three! All of them have wonderful character design and all of them suffer from weak stories too. I love ParaNorman and appreciate spunk for trying to tell a different sort of story, but it really should have been tighter. CG is what carried Transylvania to the next level. Kids are most used to seeing that form of animation.

There are plenty of animation artists who would love to drop their CG work and spend the next three years on traditional animation. It just takes a visionary to make it happen. The problem is that studios create a premise and then hire someone to make it happen and that premise usually is CG-based.

2D animation is not an artifact of the past, but it has been treated like one. It's an artform just like any other and its success depends on those involved with each project.

The Princess and the Frog was supposed to usher in a new demand for traditional animation. You can blame the marketing, the title or 2D animation, but the failure is one of story. It was poorly written! The animation was beautiful and the characters were interesting, but the movie was all over the place.

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I never got to see it, but it really feels like Disney was trying to hard to have an African American princess to add to their toyline. They had to Fractured Fairytales an older story because all our Princess stories are European, i.e. extremely white. Then they released it at a STUPID time of the year when Chipmunks 2 was doing well (story rarely enters into a film's success) because they wanted the Thanksgiving spot to be full of crappy motion capture Jim Carrey's A Christmas Seizure (that no one wanted or bothered to see). That same spot was GOLDEN for Tangled. Not to m,ention the sloppy handling of releasing Winnie the Pooh opposite Harry Potter. But then again, WTP has been Flanderized and overused by Disney to the point where it became a baby franchise.

Personally, I'm more worried about the future of stop motion animation. Pirates, Paranorman, and Frankenweenie have all underperformed against their CGI counterparts... though Frankenweenie was the only one that had direct competition. Paranorman came out at the tail end of summer when no one is actually seeing movies. August is a death slot. G.I. Joe proved that.

I never seem to had a problem with Princess and the Frog? *thinking* Maybe when they had a problem within every few seconds when they just became frogs? Or when Tiana thought Naveen betrayed her? *thinking where it was "badly written"*

I never got to see it, but it really feels like Disney was trying to hard to have an African American princess to add to their toyline. They had to Fractured Fairytales an older story because all our Princess stories are European, i.e. extremely white. Then they released it at a STUPID time of the year when Chipmunks 2 was doing well (story rarely enters into a film's success) because they wanted the Thanksgiving spot to be full of crappy motion capture Jim Carrey's A Christmas Seizure (that no one wanted or bothered to see). That same spot was GOLDEN for Tangled. Not to m,ention the sloppy handling of releasing Winnie the Pooh opposite Harry Potter. But then again, WTP has been Flanderized and overused by Disney to the point where it became a baby franchise.

Personally, I'm more worried about the future of stop motion animation. Pirates, Paranorman, and Frankenweenie have all underperformed against their CGI counterparts... though Frankenweenie was the only one that had direct competition. Paranorman came out at the tail end of summer when no one is actually seeing movies. August is a death slot. G.I. Joe proved that.

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The African America angle had nothing to do with why the story was shaky. That actually was handled well. Well, except that they hired Randy Newman to pen all the songs. That made no sense and I really don't understand his appeal. I know others do so I'll leave my discussion of him at that statement.

I like the Princess and the frog somewhat... not my favorite Disney movie....but the interesting thing is it is based on a book called the frog princess....which the movie is nothing like....I wonder if they had stuck to the story and humor of that book would it have been more successful...truthfully the only thing they share in common is the "prncess" turning to a frog. Even the character names are different.

The African America angle had nothing to do with why the story was shaky.

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I'd agree, but it seems there was too much pressure to get one out and get that movie out that was the problem. Not to mention all the crap they had to face. She's too African American, she's not African American enough.

But my point is they needed one (not to be PC, but to make more dolls), and threw together a script to get a movie out ASAP. I can't really comment on the film's final form, as I've yet to see it, but if it had script problems, rushing and pressure sound like the reason. Maybe if it had some more time in gestation and they waited a little longer, script problems could have been ironed out. Though I really wanna see it for Jim Cummings' Nawlins accent.

I just hate what is a Disney princess and what isn't. Anthro characters are outta there, so aren't Disney Afternoon/TV cartoon characters (no Mira Nova). And why not the princess from Atlantis? I know the movie wasn't a hit (had the cartoon happened, it would have been an overall improvement... Greg Weisman... that's why), but she's still a Disney Princess. Mulan isn't a Princess, but she counts... only reason the one from Enchanted wasn't was that Amy Adams didn't want to sign her life away for a likeness (kinda the reason why we never got Ghostbusters movie toys until recently).

You know, in this day and age, with CGI being such a tool anymore, it's got me thinking, why doesn't Don Bluth return to animation and try his hand at some CGI movies? Granted, I never read the book (or even heard of it to be honest), but I thought Despereaux had quite a Bluth vibe to it (albiet it's very cheesy ending): back in the 2D/hand-drawn/traditional days, Bluth always managed to come out with movies that not only had really beautiful animation that was both grounded in reality but also had some mild stylized undertones to it, but his stories were always rather gripping... makes me wonder just what he may be able to do if he started making movies again in CGI.